


A Dead Language

by Imprise



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abstract, Boredom, Character Study, Conversations, Emotional Sherlock, Getting Together, M/M, Mental Instability, No Plot/Plotless, Oral Sex, POV Alternating, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 22:45:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10774041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imprise/pseuds/Imprise
Summary: Sherlock and John meet and begin to talk about things in their own quiet way. Set after the events of A Study in Pink, the two are exposed to each other through a series of small interactions; the way Sherlock thinks and the way John feels are spliced together so that somehow, at some point, things shift between them. A short character-oriented piece, this is what I've felt for a while must be like in Sherlock's head, and how he might behave in a different setting - one not so conventional, so stilted and rational as that we've seen; one in which John's mind also falls open.





	A Dead Language

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the Salma Deera poem Half Molten. "My love translated sounds like a dead language."

When Sherlock first meets John he knows that if they start living together John will want to tell him _I don’t sleep well._ He knows John won’t say it forty seconds after meeting him, and by the end of that night he’s sure neither of them will ever sleep again. They order too much food and the light is very dim, and Sherlock imagines for a second that John is going to say something _real_. Their evasions have been horribly dull so all Sherlock’s said has been true; John has deflected and eaten and deflected and Sherlock’s just watched him out the corner of his eye, uncertain. John sometimes looks very young, he thinks. But his flatmate won’t _really_ say a word, and Sherlock would rather talk about the dead cabbie but they don’t, and the end of their meal brings joint finances by tacit agreement so Sherlock concedes a little intimacy anyway.

“So this is usual,” John mutters as they push into the ravaged flat, and Sherlock’s skin tingles because this finally sounds interesting. He can feel the boredom creeping up over the outer ridges of his skull, and knows that in a few hours, a few days, it will take over like the plague. He hates this about cases – the morning-after of it, the slug of apathy that will turn his brain to lead _– if cases weren’t this delicious_ , he thinks _, I couldn’t do it at all. If John –_

“What is?” he remembers to add. His voice sounds deeper than usual, and John turns sharply to face Sherlock where he’s still standing by the door.

“This,” he replies unhelpfully. “The quiet –”

“You think tonight was quiet?”

“The case – ” John seems to regret having brought it up. “The case,” he says finally, “made me go quiet.”

“Quiet?”

“Somewhere in the head.” He’s stripping off his jacket, looking vaguely unsettled. Sherlock rather likes this expression, it’s good and startling, John’s neck short and vivid in the dusky light. He’s still looking at Sherlock, and Sherlock’s looking back, and John’s eyes have grown almost luculent.

“Did you like it?” Sherlock thinks for a moment. “What goes quiet?”

John presses his mouth together, and suddenly looks very, very old. He turns and leaves Sherlock in the semidarkness, to wonder at his wild luck as the boredom seeps slowly out of him.

 

The next few days are ordinary enough to make Sherlock crawl out of his skin, but there’s a new mystery at hand so he doesn’t mind as much as he should have. John’s words have been carefully shelved away, and sometimes Sherlock thumbs over them, trying to make sense of it all. It’s not that they’re inexplicable; he’s devised six different explanations for them out of hand, each in some way connected to his PTSD, or the spliced chaos of war, or the hard moral streak that gets more and more obvious in John as time passes – the looks he gives strangers, his expression when writing up cases, all conducive to whatever theory Sherlock would like to carry further – vigilante-image-fulfillment, comfort-in-righteousness, pleasure-of-the-hunt, familiar-memories, and so on until he exhausts the list and starts repeating himself. Sherlock hates when he does that. He doesn’t like the conversation because it’s surprising in content, but in presence: John has articulated a very specific feeling, very much like what Sherlock craves in each new puzzle. He wants to go quiet, wants that detachment to pulse through him, mind sharp and shoulders sharp and turned in over the mystery so his neurons stop rubbing together. Sherlock wonders if this is what John really means, and it’s enough to coast him over a couple of the worst hours to watch his flatmate do normal things, like eating and sleeping and talking to Mrs. Hudson. John doesn’t know much about the sleeping, but Sherlock doesn’t take pains to hide it – he has a feeling John would only protest to have protested, and once they were over the perfunctory sensitivities Sherlock suspects he might be rather alright with the whole thing. So he watches for a good time to ask him about it again, but it doesn’t come until another two days and four hours have passed and the John issue isn’t enough to hold Sherlock together anymore. He’s been folded into a corner of his room for a long time, as far away from the outer noises as possible, finding ways to scratch out the contents of his skull with whatever rudimentary tools he has – old cases, crammed into a nook of the brain, and incomplete deductions, but it all burns through his cells like wax and he can’t help but want to take something apart. John notices two days and fifteen hours into his seclusion and tears the place up with his loudness, which Sherlock wants him to stop, so he shouts as John wrestles him into the kitchen and into a chair and some toast where the light is too white and too sharp, and won’t eat any of the hateful things John plies him with. He feels gorgeously incorporeal, and knows that food will force him to feel that he has a body, and that the body is so intensely out of himself.

“I thought you were out,” John snarls, almost to himself, banging things down in a way that wreaks havoc with Sherlock’s brain-shell. “With one of whomever doing god-knows-what, but _doing something_ , Sherlock, not sitting in the darkness –”

“Then give me something to do!” Sherlock yells, losing all semblance of composure. Things are popping up behind his eyes. John is startled, and realizes that Sherlock looks utterly deconstructed.

“What do you need?” he asks. Sherlock swirls around in his mind before it hits him that he might just get some answers now, and part of the havoc clears.

“To go quiet,” he replies, and knows John recognizes the words. “I need to take something – no, not like that,” he snaps, when John’s eyebrows shoot up. “I’ve got to let something inside. I need a case to declutter my head, understand? I need it to be sterile.” There’s been no other time that Sherlock’s spoken like this to another person. He’s saying most of it so John talks back to him, he wants to hear if this is what John means as well, but John seems to be rather loath to go on so Sherlock doesn’t push anything, just speaks until an interruption becomes likely. “Sometimes,” he says, “it feels like things inside my brain are rubbing against together. Small abrasions. I want to spill out all over something else as if I were very full and very cold.”

“So you shut yourself in a corner?”

“Do use your imagination,” he bites out, irritated beyond reason. All he’s said looks to have been in vain, and what Sherlock wants now is to get away from John again. “I’d been hoping you’d at least make an effort to understand.”

“God, Sherlock – I am, I do.” John’s tone has changed; he sounds agitated. “But what do you want me to say? I can’t condone something that hurts you like this.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Sherlock says, thoroughly confused. “Why would I want you to approve of it?”

John sighs, then bunches part of his fist into Sherlock’s crusted gown. The move is planned and awkward. “I don’t even know what we’re discussing anymore.”

“Tell me what you meant.” John squints, so Sherlock goes on. “That night. After you shot the cabbie. You said it – helped.”

John sighs. “Will it help?”

“Tell me,” Sherlock repeats, so John leans against the counter and leans a leg against his hip and lets go of Sherlock a little, but only a little. “Sometimes,” he says, “my head is full too. But it’s not full… with good things like yours. Not that I mean yours is good. Not that – it’s not – I don’t have anything intelligent in there. It’s a shit slur that I can’t really walk through and things get all crowded into each other.” He rubs his elbow onto the countertop, and Sherlock can imagine each weird fiber of his weird cardigan scraping against the marble like a little spire. “I wonder sometimes whether I’m just stupid.” John’s eyes have gone so sober that Sherlock feels some bit of him leech out between them. “I wonder if I wanted to join the army just to let go of all this shit in my head, pounding around in my skull like – I wonder if that’s what I wanted. To be ordered around like a dog. To be told things so I wouldn’t have to root around anymore, finding things, odd ends in that muddle. I wonder if that’s why I loved that night so much.”

“Loved?” Sherlock mutters, almost unconsciously, then points out quickly, “I didn’t tell you to shoot the cabbie.”

“Loved, yes, loved, I don’t have a better word. I don’t mean enjoyed. I mean it sluiced through my head, like a little. And of course you didn’t, but I took it on, didn’t I, I followed you around and loved it. God, maybe I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Don’t lie, it doesn’t suit you,” John says, one corner of his mouth quirking up in some agitation, but most of him seems to have sunk back into himself, as if he’s only a quarter present with Sherlock.

“No, I mean it. Go on.”

“You’ve spent the most part of this evening calling me an idiot.”

Sherlock doesn’t want to argue about it. Sometime he will tell him what he actually means, but at the present moment it’s difficult for him to express the various limits of John’s intellect and still be remotely sensitive. John’s not listening to him anyway. For a moment Sherlock’s afraid he’ll stop, but he goes on.

“I want you to keep touching my brain until it really splits open.”

“That’s new,” Sherlock breathes. Suddenly John looks very sharply in focus, and something’s pressing up against Sherlock’s eyelids. He puts a hand over John’s face and the man startles. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Do you want me to stop?” Sherlock asks.

“No.”

He pushes his fingers right into John’s cheeks, feeling the warmth, and then smushes one thumb against John’s temple to see if he can sense some sort of blood. John is perfectly still and perfectly silent. Sherlock wants to form a cage around his eyelids so he does, he slots his fingerpads all over John’s jaw and browline and squeezes, at first tenderly, an odd possessiveness creeping through him. It occurs to him in some basement floor of his brain that this is dangerous, and John could be hurt if he presses any harder. But he doesn’t stop until the thought really pulses, and John is still not moving so he only regretfully slides his hands off him.

“What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” Sherlock says, surprising himself.

John cracks a wild, wild grin, and looks almost demented with love.

“Me neither,” he answers.

 

Sherlock sometimes remembers sequences of things that should have been. Him, crouched in a wan laboratory at a very odd hour, pushing and synthesizing through the chemical swamp of his aorta. John’s face light and neutral, watching the weird passage of the stars in his desert. Sand crunching like glass under his boots and flak jacket, the twists and grooves of his thumbs, sand rubbing his pelvis raw in the heavy heat and John’s eyes pale, calm as violence, watching the sun and the night. A needle breaking in Sherlock’s arm. This never happened but a needle in his arm, snapping to the light and something spurting out, Sherlock’s blood and the thin hard thing in his skin, more fascinating than anything. The still still dark. Being spread out onto a sheet to be probed, but in a good way, and the hands being John’s hands and the teeth John’s teeth, not because it’s sexual but rather very insane.

While Sherlock remembers all of this, John is doing things. He’s shopping and ordering and making things happen in the flat, Sherlock is prostrate and uncommunicative so John hoovers around him. He brings Sherlock tea and biscuits and grieves next to him, although what exactly they’re mourning remains a mystery. But Sherlock feels the grief through his sinkhole of a chest, and at one point takes John’s hand and makes it follow him, so that John’s on his knees and Sherlock’s flat on the sofa and the hand is between them like an offering, or a child, or something terrible and livid. But John doesn’t even mind that his hand has been abducted, so they stay like that until he has to take a piss, or eat or sleep or something similarly menial; it occurs to John a few times that this is getting too hard to handle in some ways, but it’s lovely and unpredictable and John needs the external input. He needs the unexpected to be able to move on with his life, needs to be startled, needs someone to tell him something that he wouldn’t have been able to just make up in his head. So he loves it, just loves that Sherlock’s so damn mad, and he also knows this means he’s just as demented, and doesn’t touch Sherlock other than to bring him soup that’s left uneaten and a hand that looks very dead. But Sherlock doesn’t mind that.

There are no cases for a few days and they’re catatonic. Sherlock’s catatonic and John still moves. And then Sherlock sits up and does things with his body, and John comes up to him and makes him speak a few words.

“Are you alright?”

Sherlock blinks at him. “Yes.”

“You know, it’s been two days.”

“Thirty-three hours,” Sherlock says. He stretches out his upper back, looking decidedly feline. John goes and opens the curtains.

“What were you thinking about?” It’s not something he’d usually ask, but this time Sherlock’s silence has been far too familiar, almost inclusive, as if he were coating John as well in a thin, unobtrusive veil against the various ups and downs of the world; a delicate tether that John still feels between them, weighing down the air between sofa and window.

“You,” Sherlock answers. “And me. And Mycroft, for a while.”

“It was – Sherlock, were you being sentimental?” That sounds borderline rude, but John’s too surprised. _This is what I meant_ , he thinks, _here it is, that unexpectedness_. And Sherlock doesn’t even look offended.

“Yes, in part,” he says. “In part yes. A little.” And it sounds so clinical that John wonders at it.

“So what about you and me?”

“Being in love,” Sherlock says after a moment, “is different from falling in it.”

John’s surprised, again, and he feels wildly good about it. “In love?” he repeats.

“In love,” Sherlock confirms, a little absently. It’s a marvel just how tolerant he’s being with him. “I’ve always been in love with things. Chosen to be in love. To be present in the moment. It’s never _just happened_.”

“Oh.”

“It's deliberate,” he says. “And distasteful. Or sometimes it's very tasteful. I don't know. It's more selfish than anything.”

“You want to be – actively engaged.”

“Yes. A little.” Sherlock seems to have lost most all his inhibitions. He’s almost in a different world, talking with John like this about such intimate things. “I want to invade, John. I want to latch on to things.”

“I want to be invaded,” John hears himself say, and almost at the same time Sherlock mutters “I know.”

Then they have tea, which John cooks as Sherlock washes, and they don’t talk about it.

 

Sometimes there are cases. Sherlock’s face goes closed, or still, or frankly exulted, and John likes it when he’s exuberant but he also likes it when he looks fried. And after each case they have a small ritual dinner where Sherlock does pretend to eat things and sometimes really eats things and John pretends to know him and sometimes really feels that he does. Once Sherlock asks John where all the women have gone, because even in the early days John had women around, and John says something about churlishness and toxic things but he doesn’t mention that Sherlock is very beautiful. There is a crook in his flatmate’s eyebrow that says _I knew that about you_ and John suddenly says _I don’t sleep well._ Sherlock’s hand brushes the back of his neck. _I knew that about you too._ They have dinners where John eats and Sherlock pretends to eat and they both pretend, sometimes, that there’s nothing to say to each other. There’s always something to say to each other. Sherlock says it more often than John ever will, because he’s cold and untouchable and John just has pits in his brain. But it’s Sherlock so he knows. Of course, of course he knows.

 

“I want you to make me feel myself,” Sherlock announces one day as John’s making coffee against another counter. They seem to have so many counters. John stops what he’s doing.

“What do you mean?” he asks, as fairly as he can.

“As in my head. The whorls of my head. We talk a lot about head but I think you have it. I want you to tell me something good.”

“Good?”

Sherlock makes a gesture that looks part impatient and part spiteful. “Interesting. Be interesting.”

“Sherlock,” John says, and stops. This is going to be difficult. “Sherlock,” he tries again. “Sherlock, I’m not interesting.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You’re rather fascinating.” Sherlock’s focused each cell, the small luminescent edges of each cell into John, razor-sharp and glimmering with life. John suddenly feels stripped down to the marrow of the thinnest and most delicate of his bones, which he hopes Sherlock will some day take into his mouth out of love.

“I’m really not,” he attempts. “I don’t –”

“About your head. Tell me if you’re still quiet.”

John casts around in his skull. “Yes. I think I am.”

Sherlock’s eyes go bladelike. “Why?”

“All the action. When do you go quiet?”

“Explain. When I have something to think about.”

“Don’t you always have something to think about?”

“Something interesting. Explain.”

“You’re delightful,” John says abruptly. “There you are. You’re delightful and I’m very afraid, and that’s what’s making me quiet.”  

“That process I mentioned,” Sherlock says after a while. “The being-in-love. That makes me a little quiet as well.”

“Yes,” John answers.

“You’re in love with me.”

“Yes.” Sherlock’s cheeks are beautiful. His chin is sharp and that’s beautiful, the weird jut of his collarbones are beautiful, his nose and ears and slight tilt of head are all so beautiful that John just says it, John will never not say it after this mad, mad day. John will say it every second until he bursts, and he won’t say it ever again if it makes him burn out of his skin like this.

“It’s different for me,” Sherlock says, which is repetitive but John’ll take it. “John, you – you help.”

It takes a moment to process.

“You’re part of the silence,” Sherlock says, which is repetitive but John feels rabid. “We’ve – I have –” There’s a pause. “I’ll guess it’s still deliberate.”

“So you’re using me?” It’s not bitter. What John wants to say, actually, is _God, Sherlock Holmes is attracted to me._ But he knows as well that Sherlock Holmes does not love the way normal people love and might not ever want to have sex with him, and Sherlock Holmes touches John Watson but might not even think of him, Sherlock Holmes is a bright, exquisite thing that he’ll never figure out that might or might not be interested but that doesn't matter. _So you're in love with me?_ is the question, but it won’t ever really have an answer, because in love for Sherlock is not in love for John is not for people outside their little huddle. John finds he doesn’t mind.

“Yes,” Sherlock answers. Then he stops. “But not badly.”

John licks his lips a little, then fixes Sherlock with the most open, oddest stare. "Sherlock," he says, "I love you. And I do think you know that that's different from the others. From being in love. And having fallen in love."

"Do I?" Sherlock wonders. John's face is lit out with deep gold light. It has seeped through the rafters and the shutters and is now kissing his face very, very gently. "Yes, I do, I think."

"I don't need you to love me back," John says. "I don't mind if you're entirely selfish, if you want to be obsessed with me, if you can't help but be so. I don't mind. I'll love you anyway." Then he makes a stilted movement, as if to turn his back on Sherlock. Sherlock realizes he feels very vulnerable. He knows, contrary to what he's like, John's not a man to speak about such things, not like Sherlock is with his sharp bite and obtuse, recursive quanta of affection. Sherlock cuts out parts of his synthetic emotions and swabs them, slowly and remorselessly, over another person's skin. He snips little pieces of them to use in reaction and cooks up batches of things, nuclear fusion, to make solid what goes on in his head. But John is taciturn and straightforward, and would rather kill a man than admit he loves someone, that he's attached to them, however insensible and unreasonable that might be, so Sherlock resolves to hold each word in a separate cauldron, to hoard them like soft, glittering honey, because they're rare and very difficult and he loves John admirably. Instead of letting John turn around he crashes into him, holds his upper arms, his forehead and chest, and attempts to intimate his whole body into a wild, wild man, tempered with all the solitude and night-shadow of war and culture. And John startles but lets him, John doesn't try and make love, just opens bits of his throat and lungs to the madman in front of him, and Sherlock for once doesn't try to eat what he sees. He doesn't want to drink parts of John down, doesn't want to possess them, he wants to reach out a deft white hand and slide his fingers over each crack and groan of his ribcage and breastbone, but to let John keep all of it. It's the first time this act doesn't feel like evisceration but affection, and Sherlock's mad for it. John's quiet to it but likes it, Sherlock knows he likes it because he loves him, it's so big to be loved by someone like him, and every ugly nudge of boredom crusted in the back of his skull goes silent when John finally grabs his jaw and kisses, awkward and closed-mouthed but suddenly, startlingly passionate, and Sherlock kisses back without knowing what he's doing until each flicker of light behind his eyes die out.                       

They break apart when it becomes weird not to think. Sherlock might like quiet, but he doesn't much like silent, so when he extends a long wrist a short distance into John he feels he should really stop, because it was far too automatic to be comfortable. He could slowly, slowly shake John off but he doesn't want to do that, so instead he speaks into his mouth _this is getting out of hand_ , and in response John bites his lips and mandible and groans _I'm already obsessed with you_. And obsession is something Sherlock recognizes and can be comfortable with, so he nibbles back because obsession is good and easy, and they end up stroking whole bodies against each other.

"Are you alright?" John says finally, pushing Sherlock away. His fingers are working at Sherlock's collar. It's a stupid question so he drops to his knees, he loves the slight blankness of John's stare, and when he blows soft air all over John's crotch that stare becomes positively feral. He wants to acquaint John's penis very closely with his mouth, and trails lip and tongue all over the harsh denim as John's thumbs dig into his jaw. He's looking up at John and John's looking down at him, expression checkered with wonder, so he undoes the button and undoes his flies and finally dips down to love John's liver, except what he's loving is not a liver but his cock. John's good for it and at the end pushes Sherlock down, flat onto the ground, penis slipping out of Sherlock's mouth with a pop and coming to burn on Sherlock's thigh as he peels each article of clothing off him. Sherlock understands something primeval when John starts to suck his nipple. He understands a whole field of pain when John's palm straggles over his erection. When John's cock slots against his, turned bare, Sherlock understands why this is an act of love. John's panting. Sherlock feels the tightness in his scrotum and runs a thin hand over them together, quickly, pumping and stroking until John comes onto his shirt, groans through the semidarkness and bites the place where Sherlock's neck meets his shoulder. Sherlock shouts. His voice is very rich and loud and John kisses the shit out of it.

"That was good," he says finally, muffled against Sherlock's throat.

"Obsession is a good word," Sherlock replies, and John laughs.

"Is that why you did this? Because I'm obsessed with you?"

"It's far safer than love," Sherlock says, and John's mouth looks unpleasant, "but I like that too, that's good too, I understand this is love."

"I don't want you to say things you don't mean, Sherlock."

"I do mean it. I understand. Love with you is all right."

John smiles a little and nuzzles his head against Sherlock's temples. They both know Sherlock's mad, and might never be able to mean love in the common, obdurate way. They know John would never ask for it, and that Sherlock's fascination is love enough, and perhaps one day his packaged affection will be just enough to drown in. John thinks this and Sherlock feels he's thinking it, and instead of biting they lie together. It's as good as ever possible. John thinks it's too good for the world.


End file.
